Fiction and social history

Gunadasa Amaraseker's latest work in his octalogy of novels, 'Athara Maga' was launched yesterday. It carries forward the story of Piyadasa and his times that was narrated so vividly in the earlier novels. These eight novels constitute a significant moment in the establishment of an intimate and pivotal relationship between the modern Sinhala novel and the public sphere. Gamanaka Mula (1984) captures presciently the life in pre-Independence Sri Lanka and the awakening of an urban consciousness among the peasantry. 'Gam Dorin Eliyata' (1985), highlights the important changes that took place between 1948, when the country achieved independence, and the social revolution precipitated by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike in 1956.

The third novel, 'Inimge Ihalat' (1992), is devoted to an examination of the social formations and political transformations that took place after 1956, and how they shaped the consciousness and sensibility of the protagonist of the octalogy, Piyadasa. 'Vankagiriyaka' (1993) textualizes the disjunctions and turbulence of the 1969s when a crisis of cultural values discernibly set in and the consequent confusion of means and ends that it engendered. The fifth novel in the chain 'Yali Maga Vethata' (1993) focuses on the appeal of a kind of rural imaginary that was pervasive at the time and an attempt to defy the blandishments of Westernization. 'Duru Rataka Dukata Kiriyaka' (2001) recounts the experiences of Piyadasa who has gone to England to pursue higher studies.

The seventh novel, 'Gamanaka Mada', reconfigures the crumbling social structures and fading cultural beliefs that he perceives after his return to Sri Lanka from England. The eighth novel,'Athara Maga', advances this narrative focusing on certain disappointments and self-doubts of the protagonist. As the title of many of the novels indicate, the trope of a journey (gamana) is central to the experience explored in the eight novels. In this octalogy, which revolves around the sensibility, hesitations and actions of Piyadasa, Gunadasa Amarasekera has sought to portray the movement of contemporary social history of the island through vividly realized characters and richly textured descriptions and complexities of interpersonal relations.

As I indicated in my book, 'Sinhala Novel and the Public Sphere', in which I subject the early seven novels to a detailed analysis, the writings of Georg Lukas provide us with a productive framework within which we can locate these novels and explore their analytical meaning. His concepts of reflection totality typicality- are particularly useful in this regard. Gunadasa Amarasekera in his critical works such as 'Abuddassa Yugayak' and 'Nosevna Kadapatha' pointed out the importance of realism and history as constitutive forces. These ideas constitute a part of the frame of intelligibility that we can bring to the understanding and evaluation of these novels.

These eight novels raise some significant issues related to literary theory. Amarasekera is focusing on the vital interconnections between social history and fiction. He has always been interested in demonstrating the complex ways in which history inflects social life and structures of feeling and individual sensibilities. Examining the topic of history and narrative, the eminent French thinker Paul Ricoeur once pointed out three important facets of it. First, that there is more fiction in history than is normally accepted. Second, narrative fiction is more mimetic than we recognize. Third, there is what he terms 'crossed reference' whereby history and fiction cross upon the fundamental historicity of human experience. These observations of Paul Ricoeur are deeply relevant to an understanding of Amarsekera's intentions.

In these eight novels, the author simultaneously draws on and rejects some themes and practices of Marxist analysis. For example, he recognizes the importance of the superstructure as a determinant of meaning; it is not a mere reflection of the base as some Marxist thinkers would have us believe. Amarasekera has chosen to emphasize the ability of culture to evade and resist the demands of the base. Therefore, the idea of cultural representation, quite appropriately, figures very prominently in his cluster of eight novels.